A deliberate attempt was being made to spread confusion by ignoring the ground reality of the special intensive revision of Bihar’s voter roll, the Election Commission claimed on Sunday.

At a press conference, Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar questioned why verified documents and testimonials from political parties’ district heads and booth-level agents in relation to the exercise were not reaching their state or national leaders.

The draft voter roll published on August 1 showed that 65.6 lakh names had been removed from the list. Of these, 22 lakh were due to deaths, 36 lakh were of people who had permanently shifted or were untraceable and seven lakh were duplicate entries, the poll panel had said at the time.

“The doors of the Election Commission are always open for everyone equally,” Kumar said on Sunday. “At the ground level, all the voters, all the political parties and all the booth-level officers are working together in a transparent manner, verifying, signing and also giving video testimonials.”

Kumar claimed that some persons were misleading the public by asking why the exercise was being carried out in a hurry.

“Should the voter list be rectified before or after the elections?” he asked. “The Election Commission is not saying this; the Representation of the People Act says that you have to rectify the voter list before every election.”

This is the legal responsibility of the Election Commission, Kumar said.

He added: “When more than seven crore voters of Bihar are standing with the Election Commission, then neither can any question mark be raised on the credibility of the Election Commission nor on the credibility of the voters.”

The Election Commission’s press conference on Sunday coincided with the launch of Congress’ 16-day Voter Adhikar Yatra, or a voter rights march, in Bihar.

Kumar also said that no political party had lodged objections so far after the draft roll was published on August 1. He added that the main purpose of the revision exercise was to “purify” the voter list, adding that it was carried out after receiving several complaints from political parties.

“For EC neither anyone is Opposition nor ruling party,” Kumar said. “There is no discrimination between parties, all are the same.”

However, The Hindu had quoted workers of political parties as saying on August 9 that they had filed several complaints.

Party workers had told the newspaper that when they flag the deletion of names of eligible voters through complaints, the electoral registration officers tell them to ask the voters to submit Form 6, which is for the registration of new voters.

Citing a 2019 ruling of the Supreme Court, Kumar also said on Sunday that machine-readable voter lists cannot be released as they could violate the privacy of voters.

He added that the election commissioners are yet to decide when the special intensive revision of voter rolls is to be carried out in West Bengal and other states.

On claims made by Congress leader Rahul Gandhi that his party had found discrepancies in more than one lakh names in the Mahadevapura Assembly segment of the Bangalore Central Lok Sabha constituency, Kumar said that an affidavit would have to be submitted or an apology made to the country.

“There is no third option,” he said. “If the affidavit is not received within seven days, it means that all these allegations are baseless.”

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The revision of the electoral rolls in Bihar was announced by the Election Commission on June 24. As part of the exercise, persons whose names were not on the 2003 voter list needed to submit proof of eligibility to vote.

The draft voter roll was published on August 1 ahead of the Bihar Assembly polls expected to take place in October or November. The list will be revised by September after the Election Commission assesses objections and claims about the exclusion and inclusion of voters in the draft roll.

On Thursday, the Election Commission was directed by the Supreme Court to publish a district-wise list of the 65 lakh Bihar voters whose names were removed from the draft along with the reason for each deletion such as death, migration or double registration.

Sharing the list and the reasons for deletions will improve “voter confidence” in the institution, the court said.

The direction was passed on petitions challenging the voter roll revision in Bihar.

The bench said that the documents should be searchable based on the Elector Photo Identity Card numbers.

Scroll had reported on August 9 that the Election Commission had replaced the digital draft voter lists in Bihar with scanned images of the voter lists on its official websites.

The digital draft lists are machine-readable and easier to analyse for errors and patterns on a large scale. The scanned versions make this process harder.

On Saturday, the poll panel said that political parties or individuals who had concerns about electoral rolls prepared in the past should have raised them during the claims and objections period. It did not name any political party or person in the statement.

On August 7, Gandhi said that his party had spent six months examining the electoral rolls in Mahadevapura Assembly segment of the Bangalore Central Lok Sabha constituency and found discrepancies in more than one lakh names.

He alleged that this was evidence of the poll panel having colluded with the Bharatiya Janata Party.

The Election Commission had on Wednesday dismissed Gandhi’s allegations as “false and misleading”.

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